Indigenismo de derecha. La formación de la OPIC como “revolución pasiva”

Abstract

In March 2009 an indigenous organization called the OPIC (Pluricultural Organization of the Indigenous Peoples of Cauca) appeared in Colombia whose political position differed drastically from that of the country´s mainstream indigenous organizations since it openly endorsed the government of Álvaro Uribe. As noted immediately by some journalists and political analysts, it was believed to have been the result of a government strategy to create a division in one sector of the opposition. Such an explanation, however, is reductionist. This article aims to show, by taking advantage both of Gramsci’s notion of “passive revolution” and of some features of Discourse Analysis, how the rise of the OPIC was also due to a process of ideological identification of a sector of the indigenous population of Cauca that had deep historical roots in Evangelicalism with the politics of Uribismo. The paper thus seeks to show to what extent it is possible to talk about a right-wing indigenous movement in Colombia based on an understanding of the political dimension of religion and contrary to those who consider the rise of the OPIC to be simply the result of a divisionist and clientelist strategy employed by the Uribe government.

Keywords

• Indigenous peoples
• evangelical churches
• Uribe
• hegemony
• passive revolution.